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The 2009 Shaffer Prize For Innovative Glaucoma Research
In ceremonies on January 28 at the legendary Palace Hotel in San Francisco, John Shaffer, the son of Glaucoma Research Foundation (GRF) founder Robert N. Shaffer, MD, presented the Shaffer Prize for Innovative Glaucoma Research to Donald J. Brown, PhD. Dr, Brown is Assistant Professor, Department of Ophthalmology at University of California, Irvine.
GRF awards grants in The Shaffer Fund for Innovative Glaucoma Research to enable investigators to explore promising or novel ideas that might otherwise be overlooked and go unfunded. These are one-year incubation grants in the range of $40,000 and typically five are awarded annually, selected by the GRF Scientific Advisory Committee.
In January 2008, GRF’s Board of Directors created the Shaffer Prize for Innovative Glaucoma Research. The Scientific Advisors select one recipient annually for a completed project that best demonstrates the spirit of the Shaffer grants. The 2009 recipient is Donald J. Brown, PhD. Dr. Brown’s lab tested the general hypothesis that increasing intraocular pressure results in the independent movement of optic nerve head collagen beams, which leads to distortion of the lamina cribosa channels and compression of the axon bundles. Experimental and pathology studies have demonstrated that the initial injury in glaucoma is precisely in the lamina cribrosa or scleral portion of the optic nerve head where nerve cells from the retina form the connection to the orbital nerve and ascend toward the brain.
The data from Dr. Brown’s study should provide critically important insights as to how eye pressure causes vision damage.
(pictured L-R: Gary Cleary, PharmD, PhD with Donald J. Brown, PhD)